Friday, October 12, 2012

Mozilla has rolled out Thunderbird 16 with an utterly short list of changes, and a handful of bug and security fixed and fixes concerning stability. The new revision has only two new features – the integration of Box.com to the list of online storage services which you can use with Thunderbird Filelink, and the addition of silent updates.

Thunderbird Filelink, for those who are not familiar with the newer editions of the email program, is a feature introduced in version 13 that allows senders to upload attachments to an online storage service instead of using the email service providers attachment service. Thunderbird then automatically replaces the attachment in the message with a link to the uploaded file. This not only helps users overcome the attachment file size limit of the email service provider, but helps conserve space on their inbox – for both the sender and the recipient. As additional benefit, sending and receiving large files is much faster particularly when multiple recipients are involved.

Starting with Thunderbird 16, users will be able to choose between Box.com, YouSendIt and UbuntuOne as the storage provider. To help users jump start, Box.com is offering 25 GB of free cloud storage space for new users who signup using this special link prepared for Thunderbird users.

The other new features is the inclusion of silent updates. If you have the auto-update featured enabled under Thunderbird’s settings, the email program will silently download and install updates in the background without bothering you with prompts, nagging messages and permissions. As soon as an update becomes available, Thunderbird downloads it in the background. The updates are automatically installed the next time Thunderbird is launched.